Super Aguri are gone and the F1 field has shrunk down to 20 cars, increasing the competition for any seats that might become available.

That’s bad news for some of the promising drivers squeezed out of the sport who might have hoped to get back in – to say nothing of Takuma Sato and Anthony Davidson, left without drives following the loss of the team.

Which of F1’s recently departed drivers do you think deserves to get back in Formula 1? Here are my pick of the drivers who do, don’t and might deserve an F1 seat.

Worth another shot

Justin WilsonMinardi 2003, Jaguar 2003

Thought Lewis Hamilton’s start at Sepang last year was good? At the same track five years ago Wilson started 19th and by the end of the first lap was eighth. His tall frame made finding F1 cars that fit him a challenge and he headed off to Champ Car after being dropped by Jaguar in favour of…

Red Bull rushed the Austrian into F1 in 2004 at a cost of $20m when the Austrian plainly wasn’t ready. Considering he was a gearbox failure away from beating team mate David Coulthard to third in the 2006 Monaco Grand Prix, I think they dumped him with unnecessary haste as well.

Over and out

Ollie’s running a poll about the Japanese driver on his blog. I wrote on there: “He had a chance for Jordan. He had a chance for BAR. And he had a chance for Super Aguri. Most people don?óÔé¼Ôäót get one chance, never mind three.” I think the most telling thing about Sato is that he’s started 90 Grands Prix, every one of them with a Honda engine, and yet they didn’t think he was good enough to put him in their works team. ‘Nuff said.

Zsolt BaumgartnerJordan 2003, Minardi 2004

He plugged away to get a point at Indianapolis in 2004 but… no.

Ralph FirmanJordan 2003

Comfortably handled by Giancarlo Fisichella.

Antonio PizzoniaJaguar 2003, Williams 2004-5

Williams rated him as a test driver but his race performances left a lot to be desired. Made an embarasingly awful return to the European scene in GP2 last year, and was dropped by Giancarlo Fisichella’s team after scoring one point in five races.

Maybe, maybe not

My impression of him is permanently skewed by the fact he was smiling on the podium at Indianapolis in 2005. He might have been better than I allow myself to think he was, but judging by his alarming WTCC performance at Valencia the other week, perhaps not.

Gianmaria BruniMinardi, 2003-04

In his brief F1 career he suffered a pit fire at Monza and had a wheel fall off his car twice at Shanghai. Come the 2004 season finale in Interlagos he refused to get in the car at one point during qualifying. Subsequent strong performances in GP2 and the FIA GT championship suggest he deserved better.

A mate of mine, who works in a lower formulae of motorsport, told me at the time that the Race Engineer of the second Jaguar F1 car wasn’t all that highly regarded.

I don’t know how true that is, but if it is then it certainly accounts for the F1 racing careers of Wilson, Pizzionia and Klien.

Justin Wilson, I thought, always got a bad deal. He came into F1 with no funding and, along with Jonathan Palmer, came up with the unique solution of selling shares in his own career to raise money for an F1 seat.
Wilson did a lot of good things in F1 that seemingly didn’t get noticed by other teams.

Ah, Tiago, celebrating that podium in the Indy 6 car race like a victory was misguided, to say the least. In an ideal world a lot of those names would get another shot, but we need some more cars for that…if I have to pick just a couple Wilson and Davidson definitely deserve another shot, though I suspect only the latter really has a chance.

And can I add Robert “Doorknobs” Doornbos to the maybe, maybe not list?

i think sato proved he wasnt really top f1 standard in 2004 when jenson button finished 3rd in the WDC with something like 8 podium finshes and 1 pole position (i think) he ended up 8th in The WDC with 1 podium. not good enough with the then 2nd best car on the grid.

i think ralph firman was shocking and alot of the other drivers you mentioned were only there because they brought sponsors to teams struggling for money, like jordan and minardi

Pizzonia clearly deserves another chance ahead of Davidson – Pizzonia used to regularly outpace Ralf and One-Problem during testing for us, befoe being screwed over by Jaguar and then being used as a half-term replacement by us, whereas Davidson has done virtually nothing except be fast as a third driver (where he could use full revs while everyone else was limited)

Still think we should have given him (Pizzonia, that is) the drive ahead of Heidfeld for 2005.

Also, what about Narain Karthikeyan – he outperformed Monteiro until Kolles decided he didn’t like Narain. Maybe he’s an outside bet for the Force India seat should they drop Sutil/Fisi retire any time soon?